How Do I Disappear?

Cathy leaned across the table and finally opened her mouth.

"She's driving everybody crazy."

It was just the two of us. Everyone else had left the dining room. I had come down late, to avoid morning prayers, and I hadn't finished eating.

"I know it's awful to talk about her this way, after all she's been through, but it started before everything with Daniel and it's only gotten worse."

Cathy was a Southern Baptist from the Midwest. She spoke with the quiet excitement of someone who knew she shouldn't speak badly of a woman in mourning, but who could no longer control herself. She spoke with the sotto voce rapid-fire-ness of someone who was squashed quite a bit, and bored quite a bit, and not listened to quite a bit, and now had the knowledge, the info, the dish, the horrible tragic tale, and was serving it up to a stranger.

"And after all, it's herself who she's really hurting and someone should do something about it before it's too late. To be in such denial and such anger and then to take it out on all of us. And like I said, it's not just about Daniel, it started before that. And she's so mean to the Indians. You'd think she'd be more sensitive, being married to a Tibetan. I mean, it's not right, the way she speaks to them. We're here to build bridges and make friends and set a good example. The way she yells at them and bosses them --- oh, it's awful, and they talk about her, they talk about her behind her back, and our backs, and they just hate her. And with all that's going on in the world ---"

It was September, 2002.

"We're all going to be murdered in our beds. She'll take it too far and make someone angry and they'll use it as an excuse to murder us in our beds."

The day before, Islamic militants had entered the offices of a Christian aid organization in Pakistan and shot seven people.

Cathy knew the aid organization. She and her husband David had worked in Pakistan for many years, and Cathy had also lived in Pakistan as a child. She came from a missionary family and had grown up there and in India, though you never would have known, except for how well she spoke Hindi. Otherwise, she seemed just as adrift and American as the rest of the Southern Baptist missionaries staying at the Rokeby Guesthouse.

"Just the other day I heard her correcting Mr. Prakash on how he pronounced her name --- Mr. Prakash! Not John or Leela! Mr. Prakash ---"

Mr. Prakash being the proprietor of two stores and a hotel in Sisters Bazaar, the little village down the road, and reknowned all over North India for his homemade peanut butter. I'm not kidding --- if you told an Indian of a certain age and background that you had gone for a visit to Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas, you might hear them say, "Well, I certainly hope you went up to Prakash's Store in Sisters Bazaar to get some of that delicious peanut butter!"

I think --- for most of these Indians --- part of the appeal was that Mr. Prakash's peanut butter was the only peanut butter they had ever had. It was an exotic delicacy, because Indians don't eat peanut butter. One doesn't eat peanut butter in India.

Except at Rokeby. We ate a lot of Mr. Prakash's peanut butter at Rokeby. It was like manna to the Americans. It was served by John and Leela, two of the guesthouse's employees.

"And she wasn't just correcting, she was insisting! Insisting that he that he say her name the German way. He would say "MA-rrria" and she kept saying "NO! It's Ma-REE-a." But not even like that because I can't even say it the way she wants it said. And she's one to speak. She acts like her Hindi is so good, but it is awful, really awful."

I like how Indians say my name. Maria is a good name to have in India. It's easy to pronounce, even if it is pronounced with the accent on the first syallable, and there is a famous Bollywood song about a girl from Goa named Maria. The only part I know is the chorus:"Oh, Ma-ri-a! Oh, Ma-ri-a!" When I sing it to people, they are delighted. Sometimes they then ask me to sing an American song, and I usually launch into "Oklahoma!"

One of the missionaries at Rokeby was from Oklahoma. Her name was Tiffany and her last name was the same as mine. It was an odd coincidence --- a woman with my first name and a woman with my last name, the three of us ending up in this same little corner of India.

Maria, with my first name, was the manager of the Rokeby Guesthouse, which was owned by the Methodist Church. She didn't quite fit my picture of "German guesthouse manager" or "German evangelical missionary". She was a heavy woman, with black hair down to the middle of her back, who usually wore a garishly coloured salwaar kameez, and lots of turquoise jewelry, and a big black cowboy hat. She wore that hat all the time, even at the dinner table. She lived at Rokeby with her two extremely beautiful daughters, Christina and Sophia, and a quiet, sad-eyed husband named Sonam, who had been born in Mussoorie to a family of Tibetan refugees. She was matter-of-fact, blunt, more than a little intimidating, with a very loud voice. Whenever I made a joke, she looked me dead in the eye, paused for a few beats, guffawed out of nowhere, and then stopped abruptly. She seemed taken aback by her own laughter.

Tiffany, with my last name, had just graduated from bible college, and had come to India a few months previously with Marisa (from Virginia) and Rick (from Tenessee) to live in Delhi and "church-plant" --- a phrase I had never encountered before --- which meant, they were there to convert people and start churches. From what I could gather from the various missionary handbooks lying around Rokeby, they were going to go about this mainly by being very, very nice to Indians. In order to be able to be as nice as possible, they needed to speak Hindi, so they had come to Mussoorie, like I had come to Mussoorie, to study at the Landour Language School.

They weren't very happy in Mussoorie. They had been there for almost three months and they were bored. There wasn't much to do except study Hindi or take walks, and it had rained every single day since they had arrived. Maria ruled Rokeby with an iron fist, they were only allowed to watch a half hour of BBC World Service news each night on the TV in the common room, and they had to "secretly borrow" an extension cord so that they could watch DVDs on Rick's laptop in his room after Maria had gone to bed.

Every night, while I lay in bed reading, I could hear them watching DVDs and laughing. Their laughter was tempting. I could have gone and knocked on their door and said, can I watch? And they would have said, "Sure" with big smiles. They had tried to be friends with me, right from the start. But… were they just being nice? If I started to socialize with them sooner or later the Jesus talk would have to start, wouldn't it? So, I kept my distance. I just didn't feel up to it: lectures about faith, defending my lack of it, whatever conversation it was that would ensue. The long prayers before meals and the inspirational posters on the walls and all the religious books… that was more than enough.

And it wasn't just Rokeby. The whole area was filled with missionaries and churches. Koreans, Germans, Australians. Methodist, Anglican, Lutheran. Even the language school had been founded by missionaries, back in 1910. You couldn't throw a stone and not hit a Christian up here in --- wherever it was we were.

I wasn't sure where we were. We would talk about where we were as if we were in Mussoorie, but, actually, we weren't in Mussoorie. Mussoorie was a forty-five minute walk down the side of the mountain from Rokeby. Sisters Bazaar, where Mr. Prakash sold his peanut butter, was ten minutes walk further up the mountain and then a little place called Chardukan was right around the corner. Landour Cantonment was the gated army base between Chardukan and the near side of Sisters Bazaar and the language school was called the Landour Language School and it was just down the road, so I guess you could just say we were in Landour, but really Landour was quite a bit down the hill in the opposite direction, almost in Mussoorie. It used to be a separate village, but Mussoorie had sprawled.

In Mussoorie, it was a lot busier than wherever it was we were. We, the missionaries and the language students, sat up on our silent hilltop, peering down at the bustle below. What had been a favourite vacation spot for the British colonizers was now a favourite vacation spot for the Indian middle-class. Hotels lined the hilly streets, jostled each other, sat on top of one another. Honeymooners and weekenders from Delhi spent their days walking along the promenades, escaping the heat of the plains. They ate ice-cream and popcorn, filling their lungs with the crisp air and taking in the mountain view.

Though, during the monsoon season, you didn't get much of a mountain view. At first, when I had just arrived, the cool rain was such a relief after the heat of Delhi. But it just kept raining and raining and raining some more, and though Rokeby was much cosier and warmer and brighter than the Devdar Woods, Mr. Prakash's hotel --- even though Rokeby was the nicest of the guesthouses that the language students lived in, I was in the same boat as Tiffany and Marisa and Rick. It was cold and damp and grey and boring.

The weather settled in on me. I was weighted down, I was trapped, on edge, on guard, pointless, unmoored, foreign in a bad way. I cried all the time and felt overwhelmingly sad and whenever the rain stopped for an hour or two I went out on the verandah and stared at the wall of dark grey mist that completely obscured the valley. I tried to conjugate verbs in Hindi, but most of the time I gave up and just sat there, watching big grey monkeys chase little grey monkeys down the soaking, pine-tree and white-fence-lined twisting cobblestone road.

"Just awful. Awful, her Hindi is awful. Your accent is better than hers and you've only just started studying. She's lived here for twenty years!" Then Cathy caught herself. She had gotten carried away, strayed from the point, become a little mean. Though I couldn't blame her: Maria spoke to her like she was a slightly stupid child. The longterm residents at the Rokeby had very mixed feelings about Maria. The guesthouse was kept nicely and the food was very good and what with everything she had been through --- but she rubbed everyone the wrong way, and imposed illogical house rules, and yelled at both the servants and the guests.

"It's just her attitude. She's always right. That's what happened with Daniel and it is just a sin, the way she ignored what his teachers were saying. Everyone at his school knew there was a problem, and the principal came and spoke to her, but she just said, "No, not my Daniel" and decided the teachers were the ones who were wrong. But everyone knew he was running with a bad crowd."

Drugs were easy to find in Mussoorie. In the wooded lanes down the road from the Rokeby Guesthouse, deals were done at sunset as snowpeaks leaned over the tea stalls.

I knew this because my teachers at the language school told me. Some of them smoked a lot of pot, and they told me that if you wanted to buy some, you should go to Lal Tibba, a place where there was a beautiful vista of the mountains, and several tea stalls whose proprietors would be happy to oblige you.

And if you wanted more than pot, that could be done too. The taxi drivers down at the bus stand --- no problem.

"She just said that the principal was lying, was out to get Daniel, was out to get her and Sonam, didn't like Tibetans, or some hooey like that. Well, Daniel was very charming. Very handsome, very sweet. He had her wrapped around his finger. So young. Fourteen. A year before he had still been a little boy.

"It was just four months ago, on the last day of his freshman year in high school. After exams were over he went with some friends to a hotel in town and they rented a room to have a party. The other boys were taken to the hospital and had their stomachs pumped. He was dead when the ambulance got there.

"Maria bribed the coroner to have it listed as a heart attack."

Cathy paused. She drew a deep breath. "She bribed the coroner, and since that's what's written down, that's supposed to be a fact now. Daniel died of a heart attack. Nothing else. That's what she'll say if you ask her. That's what everyone is supposed to believe."

That's the impression I had gotten when I first arrived at the house. Her son had died, and he had died suddenly, tragically, of a medical condition. Maria hadn't told me this --- no one had told me this --- Cathy was the first person to mention it. But there was this homemade poster hanging on the wall in the entryway, with a photo of Daniel, and an inscription, and somehow the way the inscription was phrased, the way it spoke of God's decision to take Daniel --- it made me think this.

Though what was Maria supposed to do? Hang up a poster announcing that her only son had died of a drug overdose?

***

One day, on a rare, rainless afternoon, I wandered down through Mussoorie to the Savoy Hotel. It was a huge rambling place, falling into ruin, filled with echoes of the Raj --- elegant parties, important people, glamour, power. England.

It's still open, but people only stay there for the historical experience. The rooms have heavy curtains and heavy furniture, and incongruous TVs, and Raj era bathrooms, and mold. The grounds are overgrown, the plaster is crumbling. In the cavernous dining room a piano still sits in one corner, waiting to play a fox trot, and through the cracked window panes on the French doors, one can see the courtyard where cocktail parties were once held, decorated now with free-flying plastic bags instead of twinkling lights.

I feel my spirits lift a little at the Savoy. The endless possibilities of an abandoned place. I've always felt that ruins are some of the best places in the world. They are definitely the best places to play. Enough remains to create form and content, but there is enough decay to free you from reality, from the present. The world you create can be just as vivid as the real one --- perhaps more so --- but it can be anything you want it to be, you are anyone you want to be, and though tragedy will surely strike --- for what is a game of imagination without some tragedy, some high stakes, some intense emotion --- tragedy will strike with the sweet pleasure of the theatre.

I wish I was a child again, there in the Savoy. I'd get lost, I'd spend hours, perhaps I wouldn't come back.

***

I learned many things at Rokeby's dining room table. I learned about Daniel from Cathy. I learned from Cathy's husband that Christina Ricci has an occult agenda and Ally McBeal has a lesbian agenda, and Tiffany told me that Kumudh was the worst of the teachers, but she was the only was who was a Christian. Elizabeth, a Presbyterian missionary from Belfast, confided with a blush that while in college she had gone steady with Richard Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. As for Maria, she sat at the head of the table and revealed that:

She was from Hamburg.

Her father was a Spanish Gypsy.

She had been a championship ballroom dancer, but her career had been cut short when she injured her ankle.

She had been a hippy.

She had lived in Israel.

She goes undercover into Tibet to prosletize and believes that the unreached people of Tibet are the last nation between us and the return of Christ.

But the return of Christ might happen at any moment, the world is so full of evil nowadays.

***

Maria never knew her father. He left when she was a baby, left her and her mother in a one bedroom apartment in a highrise on the edge of a highway in a suburb of Hamburg. Her mother worked as a cashier in a supermarket. She was a heavy woman, with dull blonde hair and a life that had proved to be somewhat unfair and exceedingly boring.

Maria was thin and dark. Dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes. She knew she looked like her father; she had a photo of him: a thin, smiling man with a dark mustache and sunglasses. When Maria was six, her maternal grandmother came for her one and only visit, took a look around at the apartment and a look at Maria, and said to Maria's mother: "That good-for-nothing, dirty gypsy!" Maria's mother replied, "He wasn't a gypsy, he was Spanish." Her grandmother replied, "Same difference. You're pricing cans of dog food and looking after his --- " she paused and jerked her head in Maria's direction --- "and he's off in his caravan, wandering the world."

Beginning a pattern that was to continue throughout her life, young Maria took what she wanted from this exchange: Her father was a Spanish gypsy. Her father was a traveller. Her father was a wanderer, without a care in the world.

***

So I sat on the verandah and I read in my room and I walked in the rain and those first two weeks at Rokeby all I could think was:

Why am I here? What am I doing in India? I've run away again. I've got to stop doing this. I need to get on with my life. I need to… concentrate on my career, buy a house, have a baby, settle down. And why am I trying to learn Hindi? What a useless thing to do. Completely useless at home, and quasi-useless even here. This is my third trip to India and I've done fine without Hindi before.

No, no. I haven't run away. This is it --- this is life. My life. This isn't an escape. This is real, this is visceral, this is the honest to God, actual, most real part of my life. And this is productive, this is part of my career. How can I write if I don't go out and do things to write about, and in a month I'll be down in Bhopal working with the theatre troupe, and there it will be good to finally speak some Hindi, and I'll buy a house when I get home, and having a baby would be nice but isn't that jumping the gun a bit, and I don't think I ever want to settle down.

But still. If I'm here in India living my life to the fullest, why do I feel this way? Maybe it's just Rokeby. Maybe that's what the problem is. I'll give it the rest of the week. If something doesn't clear, I'm heading down to Rishikesh. Things will be better there.

I began to check bus schedules, plot my escape.

***

But then, the rain stopped. The sun broke out over the mountains. And Matri Prasad arrived.

Matri Prasad had travelled long and travelled hard. He turns up in Mussoorie one Saturday afternoon, grey beard and grey hair, wearing a white kurta top and white lunghi bottom, carrying an orange cloth bag holding all his possessions, with prayer beads wrapped around his wrist and a small black umbrella with a pink plastic handle under one arm. On his feet are Birkenstocks.

Matri Prasad has a gentle voice, with a slight Texan accent. He has come to Mussorrie to learn Hindi. It is important for him to learn Hindi, since he had moved permanently to India the year before, to live out the rest of his days in an ashram and no one spoke English at the ashram. He had thought he'd learn Hindi pretty quickly, living in an all-Hindi environment, but he soon realized that he had absolutely no aptitude for foreign languages, and that he would need to seek some professional help.

He decides to stay at Rokeby. He had been warned about the Christian missionaries, but Maria gives him a good rate, and a quiet room with a separate entrance, and permission to meditate in the garden in the mornings and evenings, and repects his special diet. He leaves a note tacked up on the dining room bulletin board explaining it: fruit and milk in the morning and evening, vegetarian at lunch. He signs it, "Matri Prasad, American monk."

Yes, before reaching Rokeby, Matri Prasad had travelled long and travelled hard. When the summer heat reached a peak at the ashram in May, he set off for the hills. He tromped the Himalayas in his Birkenstocks, visiting power places and pilgramage places. Up up, high, high, on top a glacial mountain near the source of the Ganges, he took a ritual dip in the holy river, and was so chilled he couldn't get out, and was rescued by a fellow holy man, a sadhu who had spent so many years up in the mountains that the cold no longer bothered him. The man dragged Matri Prasad out of the river, and took him back to his cave, where he warmed him by a fire, and fed him some fruit and milk, and they sat in silent and language-less communion. They sat for days, until Matri Prasad finally decided it was time to move on.

Yes, Matri Prasad had travelled long and travelled hard. In 1968 he had left the suburbs of Dallas for California. Did he leave for college or just for fun? For enlightenment? He's forgotten at this point --- it was so long ago. Another life. When he left Texas, he was still Paul Franklin Washburn. In California, he became Matri Prasad. He found a guru whose name was Ma. He joined her ashram near San Diego and in 1971 went to India to her ashram there. He loved her dearly; he carried her framed picture in his cloth bag; Ma had left her body in 1982.

In 1972, after a year in India, he went back to the ashram near San Diego. And there he stayed. And stayed. And stayed. There was much chanting. There was much fruit and milk. For thirty years he stayed there, until he decided to go back to India, back to Ma's ashram. For good. For permanent.

He moved to Omkareshwar, smack-dab in the middle of India. In the middle of nowhere. In Omkareshwar, Matri Prasad teaches English in the charitable school run by Ma's foundation. Each morning, he gathers the poor children of Omkareshwar around a big photo of Ma, and they sing hymns, and then he talks to the children in English about Ma. He doesn't feel he is doing a very good job with his classes, having had little experience with children and no experience teaching English, and he knows so little Hindi, and has no textbooks or paper or pens. It makes him happy to hear the children sing, but the experience overall is frustrating.

In the dust of Central India, Matri Prasad struggles with his ego.

In the snow of the Himalayas, Matri Prasad struggles with his body.

In the crisp cleanliness of Rokeby, Matri Prasad struggles no more. He rises at 4 and meditates in the garden, sitting on a stone bench, overlooking the lights of the Dun Valley. At seven, Leela brings him fruit and milk in his room. He studies his Hindi, goes to class and talks about Hinduism with the teachers during his tutoring session. He returns to Rokeby for lunch. The dining room is sunny, and filled with nice people who speak English. After they read from the Bible, and thank Jesus, and say their prayers, they wait for him to he say his: under his breath, a momentary muttering of Sanskrit, and a sprinkling of water around his plate. Then lunch begins. The food is always good and he eats a lot of it, sheepishly explaining how he gets really hungry by lunchtime, what with just eating fruit and milk for breakfast and dinner.

After lunch, he studies more, or goes for a walk along the clean roads, looking out at the tall pines, the distant snow-peaks. And then more fruit and milk. And then more meditation in the garden. Then sleep.

It is heaven. A balance has been struck.

With Maria, he feels he has met a strange kind of soulmate. Perhaps she feels it as well? They are close in age, and have taken similar paths, in an odd way. In California in 1968, he could have become a Jesus freak. And she could just as well have become a hippy Hindu in an ashram, as opposed to a hippy Christian in a mission, couldn't she?

***

"A gypsy. A Spanish gypsy." She kept this as a secret, as a jewel, and as she grew older, she never stopped to reconsider whether or not it was actually true. Maria's mother never spoke about her father, and Maria never mentioned this secret to her mother. Maria never mentioned it at all, until, as a teenager, she started winning ballroom dancing competitions and then she began to occasionally toss off statements like "It must be my gypsy blood." The other dancers could never tell if she was telling the truth, and, truth be told, she couldn't tell, either.

It was 1971. Maria was sixteen, olive skinned, with dark flashing eyes and long dark hair and a good figure. Her speciality was the tango and she had either won or come in second in all the local amateur competitions. People were starting to talk, to suggest that she could turn pro. She was going to the national amateur championships in Frankfurt, and if she did win --- travel, glamour, glory. When she thought about it, the image in her mind of a future like her mother's --- the image in her mind of the supermarket checkout line --- dissolved.

Then, just a week and a half before the nationals, Maria broke her ankle when the heel popped off her tango shoes. It was a bad break. She didn't go to nationals. She spent three months in a cast. She realized that though she might dance again, she would never go pro.

She lay on the living room sofa with her leg elevated, while her mother fed her bitter consolation and semi-sweet chocolate. She started to lose that ballroom dancing figure and wondered if her mother's words were true. Was it better to be disappointed now than later? Better to face reality instead of following her dreams? Perhaps being a fat supermarket employee was her true fate, just now catching up with her after a short and glamourous detour? How far can you run from Fate, from that long arm of Fate, before it snatches you up? Was there no Gypsy blood, was she now becoming the person who she was really supposed to be?

After months of mulling this over, after reaching a point where she was about to give in, she finally got the cast off. And on that day, she would later recount, the long arm of Fate was thrown off-track by the hand of God.

She met a Christian hippie at the doctor's office. They struck up a conversation in the waiting room. He was really nice, and told her that she had not lost her only chance, told her that there was more --- more to their lives, more to the world. There were endless possibilities, you could find endless possibilities in the love of Christ.

He invited her to a fellowship potluck later that week. She went, she liked it, she went again. She loved it, she went again. And again. And again. She saw the possibilities, she joined the club, joined the commune, joined salvation, and, six months later, she joined a caravan to a mission in the Holy Land.

***

I decided to stay a while longer at Rokeby. I was feeling better with the sun out, Matri Prasad was an interesting addition to the dining room table, and I was finally making some real progress with my Hindi. But I did go down to Rishikesh one weekend. You might have heard of the holy city of Rishikesh --- that's where the Beatles made a big splash in the Ganges with their guru. The town is full of ashrams, sadhus, pilgrims, and backpackers studying yoga. It was good to be there, I felt like I'd edged back into the "real" India, a guidebook India, full of crowds and cows and temples.

It's easy to get lost in this India, on purpose or by accident. People disappear in this India. They disapppear into ashrams or disappear into the mountains or they just disappear into their guesthouses to sit around and smoke pot. Most reappear after a while. But some disappear for real. I see posters stuck around Rishikesh: on walls, in cafes and guesthouses. Missing people posters.

"Missing since July 5^th, 2002. Last seen swimming in Ganga near Laxman Jhula in Rishikesh. Age 22. Blonde hair, fair complexion. Contact Australian Embassy, Delhi."

"Missing since March 24^th, 2002. Heading from Rishikesh to Valley of the Flowers in Himalayas. Age 28. Dark hair, beard. Contact Italian Embassy, Delhi."

I don't think these people are usually found. I think some of them drown the Ganges, and some of them fall off the edge of a mountain. And some of them just want to go away. And so they do.

***

Maria continued to hold court at the dining room table, surrounded by Matri Prasad, the missionaries, and myself. And I learned that:

She had never tasted real sushi, but had figured out how to make a vegetarian approximation from a cookbook. We have it one night for dinner; it is excellent.

Ten years ago, she worked with the Indian government to help uncover an international ring of smugglers dealing in the pelts of endangered animals.

She had once healed her husband through the power of prayer.

***

"We went on a camel safari in Rajasthan: my husband Sonam, myself, my son Daniel and my daughter Christina. My daughter Sophia was too young to come; we left her in Dehra Dun with Sonam's mother.

Out in the middle of the desert, Sonam cut his leg on a rusty bit on the saddle. We bandaged it and put antibiotic cream on it, but still it got infected. I thought we should turn back but Sonam said it was no big thing so we pressed on. But it got worse and worse and finally I insisted we head back but by then we were five days away from the town and the leg was not good.

The camel men took us to a village and an ayurvedic healer put a compress on the leg. And Sonam lay there outside in the desert and under the stars and I sat over him and prayed and prayed and prayed.

And the next day, his leg was healed. Jesus heard my prayers and healed his leg.

Perhaps you think this story isn't true. Perhaps you think it wasn't Jesus but that ayurvedic medicine, but I tell you, though that medicine might have helped, the next morning all the swelling, all the pus, was gone and no medicine did that. Jesus did that.

And, you know, if I was standing here telling you that Buddha healed my husband or Krishna healed my husband, how many of you would be more inclined to believe that? If I said crystals healed my husband, what would you say? If I said that I held a picture of the Dalai Lama over my Tibetan husband's leg, what would you say, hmm? If I said I chanted "om" all night long? But Jesus? No, you don't want to believe that. The truth is much too ordinary.

Not to the Tibetans, it isn't. You might not think I could pull it off, but I can. I put on the traditional clothing of Golok nomads --- this black hat, the turquoise jewelry, I braid my hair like the women do, and with my colouring, I pass. Not all Tibetans have flat noses and slanted eyes. Some look almost Western. And I go with a Tibetan woman who speaks Chinese as well and she handles all the talking.

I won't divulge the specifics of how I get there. But one thing I can tell you --- I don't go over the border from Nepal on a tour bus. I go "under the radar," so to say. I must. The Chinese would not let us in otherwise, especially not to the area where we go.

The Golok nomads there, in this area --- a remote place even for Tibet --- have never heard of Jesus. They cry when we tell them about Him and ask "Why has no one told us of Him before?" A boy came to me who couldn't move or talk or hear and I prayed over him and our Lord Jesus healed him. I prayed to Jesus and he was healed and his mother cried. That's the power of Jesus.

In Tibet, my name is Lobsang."

***

The problem with going away is that you can't ever do it completely. You always bring yourself with you, even as you bring yourself to a foreign place. I mean, it's true, isn't it, what any Buddhist monk with a book deal would tell you: The answer lies inside. Contentment, happiness, true escape lie in taming your wild mind, not the wild world.

Matri Prasad knows this, and he's trying, he's trying, he's gotten quite far. But the problem is, no matter how much he changes himself, there's one thing he forgot to change: his name.

Paul Franklin Washburn. Matri Prasad would like to think that Paul Franklin Washburn no longer exists, but he keeps popping up, whenever there are forms to fill out. He leaves official traces behind: at every airport he flies into, at every hotel he stays at. In the ledger at the ashram. In the attendance book at the Landour Language School. Here in India, where beauracracy reigns supreme, and every interaction demands a piece of paper, Matri Prasad cannot escape Paul. He had changed himself, but why, oh why, he wonders, had never thought to legally change his name.

***

Cathy still hadn't finished the story.

"Right after the funeral she decided that she'd make that little cottage out back into a memorial for Daniel, sort of a clubhouse for his friends from school. A collection was taken up, and she bought a pool table and his friends painted the mural."

I had wondered about the cottage. There was a sign saying "Daniel's Den" hanging outside, and flowers painted around the door, which was padlocked.

"But when the students came, she started to take them aside one by one, and tell them that if it wasn't for the principal, Daniel would still be alive today. It was very upsetting for the kids, very confusing. The school declared all of Rokeby off-limits and Maria locked the clubhouse up.

"She told Elizabeth that after Christina graduates and goes off to college, she's going to take Sofia and leave Sonam and go to Tibet. She's already broken her husband's spirit and then she'll break his heart."

And with that, Cathy was finished. She sat back in her chair. I didn't know what to say.

***

The time came to leave Rokeby. I had planned to study Hindi for a month, and I did. The day before I leave, I have my final Rokeby Sunday dinner: beef strogonoff, mashed pototoes, green beans, tomato salad, and jello for dessert. The next morning, I go to Maria's quarters to settle up my bill.

I hadn't been in her part of the house before. It was decorated with lots of Indian and Tibetan textiles, and hippie-ish pottery, and lots of photos: photos of the family, photos of friends, photos of Tibet.

After I pat my bill, she shows me some of the photos: Maria in Tibetan dress, standing next to her Tibetan companion. The children of a village they had gone to, smiling and reaching out towards the camera. A lame boy who she tells me was healed after she and her companion prayed over him.

She doesn't say anything about the other photos: a much younger and thinner Maria, sitting next to Sonam at Lal Tibba. Two dark-haired children opening presents underneath a German Christmas tree. In front of the Red Fort in Delhi, Maria smiling with her arm around Daniel.

I said goodbye to Maria, and went to the verandah to wait for my taxi. Matri Prasad was out there studying. I told him that Maria had shown me photos of her trips to Tibet, and he said that he had already seen them, and she had told him all about her work there. He said that he admired much of what the missionaries do --- helping people in need, providing medicine and food --- but that he is disturbed by their belief that Jesus is the only way to God. "That," he says, turning briefly angry and vehement, "that is the devil's evil lie."

My taxi came and took me down to the bus stand. But I had just missed the bus to the train station in Dehra Dun, so I decided to share another taxi with a older Punjabi couple who were returning home after a vacation. We got in a cab, and drove on, past the hotels and the cotton candy and the ice cream, past a crowd of schoolgirls dressed in striped ties and blue blazers and kilts, past one last little white church.

As we edged out of Mussoorie, rain began to fall for the first time in days, and then the rain turned to hail, which thumped on the taxi, violently and alarmingly, seeming as if it might shatter the windshield or crash through the roof onto our heads.

***

Six years before, during the third week of my first trip to India, I was in Khajuraho --- where they have those famous temples with all the erotic stone carvings --- and I missed the bus out. But then I met Sandy Lal, who had his own jeep, and was about to leave for Delhi, so I got a ride with him. Sandy was about 45, half Indian and half English. He had a used car dealership in a suburb of London, and to me, he was so quintessentially English in a very working class, pint-of-beer-down-the-pub kind of way about him. But then I saw him interact with Indians, and he was a completely different person: a privilaged, educated man, who had gone to one of the best private schools in India, the son of an officer in the Indian army. He'd pull rank, boss the peons around, schmooze with the other privilaged Indians. And then turn around to me and say, "Do you fancy a beer, love?"

The trip took two days. Sandy was a wealth of information, pointing out places of interest, introducing me to delicious new dishes when we stopped for lunch, giving me the lowdown on India. We took a slight detour to see the famous fort in Gwalior, and sat among the ruins drinking Indian whiskey, and then drove on until Agra, where we stopped for the night. Sandy asked if I wouldn't by any chance fancy sharing a room, and I said no, and he said, fair enough, worth a try, and we got two rooms and the next morning I went to see the Taj Mahal while Sandy visited some friends of his parents. We left Agra at noon, and on the way out of town Sandy insisted on stopping at Akbar's Tomb to see the famous tribe of black-faced monkeys that had been kind enough to adopt two orphaned red-faced monkeys, in defiance of all the rules of the jungle. We reached Delhi in the evening, and Sandy dropped me at the YWCA and wouldn't take any money for gas, or let me pay him back for the meals he had bought along the way. I was a bit sad to see him go; it had been a nice journey.

The road between Agra and Delhi had was congested and hot, it had seethed with people and reeked of freshly poured tar. But before we reached Agra, the road had not been like that at all. It had been winding and isolated. It passed through the Chambal River Valley, the badlands of India, an 8,000 square mile expanse of empty, dry, desolate zig-zagging ravines. At one point, we pulled the car to the side of the road and got out to stretch our legs. I scrambled off the tarmac, down the sandy dirt, and then up a little ridge, and down again. I stayed there a moment. I looked around. Nothing ahead of me, nothing to the one side, nothing to the other. Behind me was Sandy, and the road, and a billion people. I went back to the jeep, and we headed on.

I still think about that place.

I find myself going back to that place quite often. When I go back there, I look around. Nothing ahead of me, nothing to the one side, nothing to the other. Everything behind. And so I start walking forward. Up one ridge, and down another, and then into the ravines. And so I'm gone. Behind me is my luggage and my passport. Ahead of me is blankness. No possibilities, no choices, no chance. I've removed myself. And that's it. That's the end.